On a voiceless shore

by Stephen Minta

In April 1824, at the age of thirty-six, George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, died in a wretched Greek town while fighting for Greece in its struggle for independence. What was it that took this man - brilliant poet, as even his fiercest detractors admitted, rakehell, and gadabout - to so commit his life and his soul to a struggle so far from his native shores? For many of Byron's biographers, Greece represents a mere passage, episodes worthy of mention but empty of meaning. For Stephen Minta, himself a lover of the complexities of this country, Greece - emotionally, physically, creatively - features hugely in any attempt to understand Byron. "If I am a poet," Byron wrote, "the air of Greece has made me one." Perhaps unique among his generation, Byron loved Greece the way he found it - a land of sensations, of sun and sea and light, but also a place of irritations, of frustration, duplicity, and cruelty. If his fellow countrymen saw in Greece only antiquities, monuments reinforcing a class